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Thursday, October 16, 2014

A provocation from WWF's chief scientist John Hoekstra that's exactly where I end up in my new post over at Edge Effects. It's a fun intro to quantum computing that backs into a discussion of the assessment and geodesign software tools that conservationists are deploying around the world to better measure restoration interventions, track environmental change, and fight back against environmental crimes like illegal logging. Ultimately, I'm less sure than Hoekstra that the answer to his question is a resounding yes.

The post comes right on the heels of a few interesting stories out the past few days. First, yesterday the Natural Capital Project has launched a MOOC, where you can learn about their toolset. I've written speculatively about some of those tools here before, but it's great to have the chance to go behind the scenes. Second, Hoekstra held a Twitter-mediated conversation last week during SXSWEco, discussing the potential for drones, big data analytics, and other emerging technologies to, well, save the planet. I'm not even convinced yet that what we're seeing conservation right now qualifies as big data - the term seems loosely applied - but Hoekstra led an important conversation about how to do big data in conservation while recognizing issues of security, digital divides, and privacy.

So check out the post, and be sure to bookmark or follow Edge Effects while you're at it. It's an amazing new site run by grad students affiliated with the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Center for Culture, History, and Environment.

Thursday, August 21, 2014

$125
trillion is no small chunk of change. You could, without a doubt, buy
a lot of stuff with that in your pocket. In fact, it's more than the
world's gross domestic product (GDP), or the value of all the goods
and services produced in the global economy each year - everything
from cars to haircuts to World Cup tickets. But according to a
recent study led by Bob Costanza, $125 trillion is also the
dollar equivalent of what all the work the world's ecosystems do for
us - things that aren't normally counted in GDP, like the flood
damage a coastal wetland prevents. The $33 trillion mark and other
figures like it vary widely while provoking much controversy...and
are increasingly taken by world political and business leaders as
self-evident, touted as the next big thing in conservation.

$125
trillion is a best guesstimate. It's a follow-up to Costanza's
landmark
1997 paper in which he and colleagues suggested the number might
be more like $33 trillion. At the time, other
researchers had reviewed existing valuation studies, finding that
overall an acre of wetlands might be valued anywhere between six
cents and over $22,000! Other commentators noted that looking at just
one particular ecological function (say, flood prevention), the
values researchers came up with could differ by two orders of
magnitude from site to site. For many
critics, these numbers imply the reduction of nature to something
to be bought and sold, which is particularly problematic if they're
going to fluctuate so wildly. For others, no matter the range of
values, they just aren't helpful - they're all a "serious
underestimate of infinity" because we simply can't do
without many of things nature does for us, like provide breathable
air. Still, for a growing number of conservationists and
decision-makers, putting some number - often a dollar value - on
ecosystems is exactly what's needed to save it, to show policy makers
and businesses the economic importance of nature, in hopes of
preventing its destruction and encouraging its conservation.

So
where do these numbers come from?

It's
appealing to write-off statements like, "the value of an acre of
wetland is six cents," as simply the work of ivory tower
intellectuals busily justifying their own existence. After all, the
scholars who published the most recent study are all affiliated with
an academic institution. It's also easy to get the sense that these
numbers come from no place in particular. That's the feeling you get
reading histories of the ecosystem service concept (see here
and here).
These papers do important work revealing that the valuation of nature
just didn't come along in 1997 with Costanza et al.'s first estimate
of the value of the world's ecosystems. But beyond having a history,
behind Costanza et al.'s new number and the “modelling
sausage” that spit it out is a body of literature, a set of
theories, and communities of scholars called environmental and
ecological economics. And this community and its history is grounded
in place. Valuing nature didn't just appear from out of nowhere.
Environmental, and its younger, upstart cousin, ecological, economics
and the basis for valuing nature come out of a long-standing
engagement with wetlands, especially coastal marshes, and
particularly as they faced development pressure, often from the
oil/gas industry. When ecologist Eugene Odum and economist Len
Shabman sparred
in the 1970s over how exactly conceptually and empirically to get at
nature's value, their material was Gulf Coast marshes. Today, in a
post-Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy world, when we hear prominent
arguments for restoring or conserving ecosystem services because of
their value, it's coastal places like Mobile Bay, AL that are paraded
out as examples of where coastal restoration "show
strong returns on dollars invested." It's
the US Gulf Coast that has defined nature's valuation as we know it
today
- its methodology and policy advocacy - and will continue to shape it
in the wake of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

The
Gulf Coast oil and gas industry's payments to oystermen for access to
lay pipelines across harvesting grounds mark economists',
conservationists', and others' earliest struggles with valuing
nature's goods and services beyond the confines of established
markets. The Gulf's hydrocarbon industry grew significantly following
World War II in order to meet growing demand from suburban consumers,
as Jason Theriot details in his great
new book about the twin histories of the industry and wetland
loss and protection in the Gulf. But, of course, companies like
Tennessee Gas needed to get their products to market - mainly on the
rapidly urbanizing east coast - from wells in the middle of
Louisiana's marshes. To do so, they laid hundreds of miles of
pipelines in canals carved through wetlands. These areas, however,
were often the same spots where oystermen had traditionally
harvested. At the time, in the 1950s, the ecological consequences of
the kinds of hydrological disruptions caused by canals were already
to some extent understood by fishermen and scientists alike: the
catch would likely be diminished from any nearby canals. In part
because many working in the hydrocarbon industry were local oyster
experts themselves and in part because of the influence the fisheries
community had historically exerted on state regulators, oil and gas
companies went out of their way to provide compensation for direct
damages from pipelines. What the industry paid was simply what the
expected catch would have fetched on the open market. In paying
oystermen for losses to their harvest, oil and gas companies were
acknowledging:the broader effects of their activities, but still had
some market signal to guide them; they were not trying to compensate
for things without market prices like water quality that
environmental economics pioneers like Dales were first proposing at
the time. The industry's payments were ad hoc and not meant to be a
systematic assessment of all of the what we would now call ecosystem
services a wetland provided. Still, conservationists seemed to be at
least considering for the first time about what values the market
wouldn't capture. For instance, the chief of the Oyster Division of
Louisiana's Wildlife and Fisheries Commission was particularly
concerned that compensation would not account for long-term,
large-scale effects:

“we
feel that the long range effects resulting in permanent ecological
changes are by far the most serious and the most difficult to assess
damages for.
Direct effects are largely a matter of obtaining ROW [right of way]
and making adjustments for damages at the time of construction. The
area involved is comparatively small and involves only the path of
the canal and the immediate vicinity on each side. Ecological and
hydrographic changes may be permanent and may affect extensive areas
ten miles or more on either side of the canal.” (58)

Into
the 60s and 70s, conservationists at Louisiana's state environmental
agencies and at Louisiana State University (LSU) continued calling
for a more formal recognition of the importance of wetlands, as part
of a growing movement nationwide to daylight corporate and government
decision-making that had impacts on the environment. As the story
goes, in1969, the massive
oil spill offshore of Santa Barbara, CA inspired Congress to pass
the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which required all
federal agencies to undertake a formal review of the costs and
benefits of any action with a major effect on the environment. NEPA,
however, did not require agencies to monetize these costs and
benefits in order to evaluate projects. Ultimately, with executive
orders from Reagan and successive administrations requiring more
cost benefit analysis (CBA), monetization became the default. Already
by the 70s, the Army Corps of Engineers had been conducting CBAs of
its projects. As Tennessee Gas looked to the dock price of oysters to
account for some of the broader effects of its pipeline canals, the
corps might determine whether or not to build a dam based on the cost
to fisheries weighed against the benefits, measurable in dollar
terms, arising from new recreation opportunities.

CBAs
accounted for only so much of what conservationists thought was
important about coastal habitats. ←
This if anything is the
constant refrain throughout the history of nature's valuation, from
both advocates and critics: what are we counting? CBA
might assess how a levee project would cost in damages made to
fisheries, but at the time there were few techniques for accounting
for the loss of storm surge protection that came from impounding
wetlands. Easily the landmark piece decrying the limits of CBA was
James Gosselink, Eugene Odum, and R.M. Pope's 1974 paper, “The
Value of the Tidal Marsh”. It was a short white paper written
for the LSU Center for Wetland Resources, but nonetheless recieved
remarkable national attention from wetland conservationists as they
made their case in the 70s for increasing resource protection.
Gosselink et al.'s aims were to counterbalance development pressure
on coastal ecosystems by expanding what ought to be counted as
monetary cost from development. For instance, they valued the waste
assimilation capacity of wetlands by looking at what it might cost
regions to fully treat their sewage if all wetlands imply vanished
and were replaced with wastewater plants. This “replacement cost”
was not a market price, but was an existing signal (and it's measures
like these that led to some of the most famous examples of
institutional payments for ecosystem services, namely New
York City's payment to farmers in the city's watershed to
conserve natural habitat, which has reduced the region's water
treatment costs.) The group, in the end, described wetland value in
terms of $/acre/yr, but how they got their was through the concept of
"emergy.” Emergy is a neologism for the amount of solar energy
embodied in an ecological good or service. This could be converted
into monetary terms by comparing the caloric requirements for service
production in a wetland to the price to burn calories in things like
oil that do have a market price. It may sound a little convoluted
today, but the idea still has some traction. What's important about
the emergy argument is that it proposes that nature's value is
intrinsic; value arises from ecological transfrormations of energy,
rather than supply and demand. Not surprisingly, this upset many
economists, some of whom thought the idea went against some of the
fundamental tenets of their discipline, in which value is
fundamentally relative, dependent on the vagaries of supply and
demand, and ultimately, how much rational subjects desired certain
things. This is precisely what Gosselink et al. were skeptical of: if
we believe neoclassical economics, nature has no value because it has
no market price. But of course nature has value and so it must reside
somewhere
in nature. As one research team later put
it, “The point that must be stressed is that the economic value
of ecosystems is connected to their physical, chemical, and
biological role in the overall

system,
whether
the public fully recognizes that role or not.”
(emphasis in original) Politically, this perspective translated into
an argument to not leave wetland protection to the whims of the
market, but for better government planning. That would be something
at least Gosselink would be more involved with in the next decade,
contributing to the consolidation of Louisiana's modern oil/wetland
regulatory regime while leading environmental reviews of projects
like the massive Louisiana Offshore Oil Port.

One
student of Howard
Odum – Eugene's brother and collaborator - was none other than Bob
Costanza, lead author of the 2014 paper valuing the world's ecosystem
services at $33 trillion. After graduating from the University of
Florida in the late 70s, he got a job at LSU. As
he recalls it, he was in part drawn there by the presence of
Herman Daly, whose work was moving in similar directions and had been
an inspiration, and who happened to show up at his job talk. LSU at
the time would have been a hub of activity focused on valuing nature,
through coastal marshes, with Gosselink, Costanza, and Daly all
pioneering in their own way and Eugene
Turner, another freshly-minted student of Odum, making headway on
understanding the ecological effects of oil and gas canals on the
coast. Throughout the 80s (and to some extent into today) Costanza
would publish on the ecological and economic facets of Louisianan and
Gulf wetlands. In one
paper in particular, 1989's “Valuation and Management of
Wetland Ecosystems,” he and his co-authors produced another
estimate of Louisiana's wetlands, a follow-up to Gosselink et al.
Like Gosselink et al., Costanza, Maxwell, and Farber conducted an
emergy analysis. But they also did something different: besides
counting calories or looking at the market rate of fish raised by
coastal estuaries, they actually hit the pavement (a boat ramp
parking lot, actually) and asked people what wetlands were worth to
them. The technique is known as contingent valuation. What they were
after was people's "revealed" preferences - the amount each
person spent on gas to get themselves to a wetland to fish could be
considered part of its value, as a provider of a recreational
service. The researchers were also interested in "stated"
preferences - what people say they would pay to protect a wetland. If
you're thinking that preferences sounds
a lot more in line with the
neoclassical economics approach than with the emergy perspective,
you'd be right. We might read Costanza et al.'s paper as a sort of
continental divide in the valuation of nature: the first half an
emergy analysis focused on elucidating the inherent values of nature,
a perspective that was prominent up until that point, the second half
all about new techniques to get after how much society desires
wetlands in practice, regardless of what nature has to say about it,
new and exciting methodolgies that were about to get their trial by
fire (see below). And this sort of split reflects where Costanza et
al. end up in the paper when it comes to policy recommendations: they
suggest that oil and gas companies provide bonds to cover the
mitigation of their impacts. The amount of the bond would be based on
the predicted extent and nature of the impacts, and depending on the
final ecological outcome, the company would get more or less of its
bond back. The researchers' argument here was not for better planning
to restrict where the oil and gas industry could work, but to modify
the industry's accounting practices, something that is all the rage
now, with TEEB and TNC
working hard at incorporating green accounting in business.

Here's
the thing about contingent valuation: it doesn't work. Economists
often expect people to behave rationally, but asking people how much
they would pay to protect pelicans has presented economists with a
number of persistently thorny issues. For
instance, when researchers ask people how much they would pay to
protect a nearby natural area from a hypothetical development
scenario, people regularly act strategically and give “protest”
answers. They'll say $0, insinuating that the park is priceless, or
offer some absurdly high price, all in the belief that there may be
an actual development project in the works and that their answers may
stop it. It also turns out that people don't value twice as much
wetland at twice the price. It was another “largest to date” oil
spill – the Exxon Valdez tanker leak in 1989 - that brought to a
head many of the methodological concerns surrounding the use of
contingent valuation (in theory and applied to real cases).
Economists and regulators alike asked
themselves, how do we figure out how much damage the tanker spill
has caused to wildlife? What about the value someone in Iowa places
on the mere existence of some species in Alaska? NOAA, in charge of
the clean-up, commissioned a study led by some of the top minds not
just in environmental economnics but economics writ large - Nobel
Prize winners like Kenneth Arrow - to see if contingent valuation was
a proper method to use. They found that it was, and the courts have
affirmed NOAA's prerogative to use it. But
rarely it has.

Instead,
NOAA has tended to employ good ole replacement cost. If it costs $100
million to buy all the construction equipment, fill, and plants to
replace a wetland degraded by a Chevron oil spill, then Chevron must
pay that amount. Like contingent valuation, the problem with
replacement cost, as practiced in NRDA compensation, is that it
doesn't work. The cost of replacing ecological structure doesn't
necessarily equal the cost of lost ecological functions. It's one
thing to put the right kinds and quantity of plants back in; it's
another to make sure that the ecosystem is providing the same kind of
flood mitigation service, for instance.

Doubts
about the object and goal of compensation are precisely what are
haunting economists yet again following the lastest “largest oil
spill to date,” the Deepwater Horizon spill. It inspired a
revisiting of the contingent valuation question with some authors
revising their position from 20 years ago post-Exxon Valdez. Diamond,
for instance, is
now even more critical of contingent valuation and more skeptical
that it could ever be of much use. Some number is not
better
than no number. Meanwhile, the spill has become a poster child for
ecosystem service valuation advocates. In the monumental TEEB
synthesis report, the section on “Applying the Approach”
begins with the lamentation that if only the value of wetland
services had been properly accounted for in business practice, BP
would have never let the spill happen.

What
is clear from the Deepwater Horizon fallout is that beyond whatever
BP ends up having to pay to compensate for affected wetlands, they're
going to have to pay separate fines into another fund to be used for
large-scale restoration of the coast, beyond specific places the
spill reached. This is a (bitter) windfall for conservationists; as
one put it -"This is a once in a lifetime opportunity" to
do something about Louisiana's land loss problem. BP money, at least
in Louisiana, will be funneled into the Master
Plan the state's CPRA has developed. The Master Plan lays out
restoration principles and priorities (e.g. let nature do the work -
harness the Mississippi River to deliver sediments to open water to
build new land) and describes a suite of sites selected for
restoration. These sites were selected based on their cost
effectiveness, which in part has been a question of how many
ecosystem services restoration will bring - how much flood prevention
or how many alligators, for instance. The question here has is not so
much the cash value of these services; the authors of the Plan
explicitly note: "We didn't have the time this time around to
look at that." As the head of the CPRA noted, however, this kind
of analysis is in
the works for the next version of the Master Plan, coming in
2017. At the heart of the matter is the development and deployment of
economic valuation techniques for evaluating public spending.
Economists
are hard at work determining what kinds of restoration are most
worthwhile: how many acres will $X in sediment diversions bring in
over time compared to other methods of marsh creation? So far,
acreage - a fairly straightforward metric - has been the target,
which makes sense giving land loss is measured in acres, but expect
to see ecosystem services migrate into the accounting. The goal in
valuing the land building and protecting services provided by coastal
wetlands is to spend public money wisely in an era of austerity.
These metrics allow decision-makers to evaluate tradeoffs. Already in
the master plan, the increase in certain ecosystem services like
carbon sequestration were argued to outweigh and justify the decrease
in other services, like shrimp habitat. Again, these were not yet $
valued. This time around, it certainly won't be emergy used to derive
the value of these public goods. Instead, what we are seeing hints
at is a move toward marketizing services. Instead of developing $
metrics to inform planning or to build new public institutions (via
bonding a la Costanza), some important Louisiana decision-makers are
turning to potential carbon and nutrient markets to help value (and
pay for) wetland benefits. There's no need to do contingent valuation
of a wetland function like carbon sequestration that is traded in
California's cap and trade market at $10 a ton - that's the value
right there.

Where
does nature's value come from? In no small part, from those working
to understand and protect Gulf Coast marshes. The practice of
assigning the environment a dollar value continues to evolve and does
so as practitioners – regulators, economists, scientists - engage
with these ecosystems, providing certain opportunities and obstacles.
Indeed, an ongoing question within the field is the role of
environmental science and the extent to which ecologists can provide
the kind of information about nature economists want and need to do
valuation. The complexity of ecological functions - their
nonlinearity, dynamsism, etc. - has long been acknowledged as a
stumbling block, from Westman's prescient 1977 Sciencearticle
to the Millenium Ecosystem Assessment to even the most ostensibly
gung ho supporters of valuation, TEEB. These difficulties do not mean
that the champions of the valuation of nature feel defeated. Just
consider how Costanza felt in 1997, "….although ecosystem
valuation is certainly difficult and fraught with uncertainties, one
choice we do not have is whether or not to do it". Besides
environmental economics' struggle with its existential dependence on
externally produced knowledge, its practitioners struggle with
understanding their own conditions for knowing nature's value.
There's still much question about whether contingent valuation will
work. We've seen a few here: people don't always act rationally, and
they also reject the survey techniques researchers employ to come up
with their numbers. This is setting aside what is perhaps the
trickiest question, that of benefits
transfer, or the practice of taking the monetary values for
ecosystems in one part of the world and using them in a different
part of the world. After all, as one scholar put
it, "An acre of coastal salt marsh seaward of New Orleans is
many times more valuable …than an acre of abandoned farm pasture in
Nebraska” and it's being able to say how much more valuable and how
locally specific to get that troubles many researchers. Finally, what
kind of policy angle environmental economists ought to take is still
open to debate (the riff between so-called environmental and
ecological economists itself is a part of that). Is nature open for
business and up for sale? Or is the goal simply better planning and
perhaps $ numbers aren't needed? You can expect those questions to be
asked if not resolved in any good paper today. Yet, as one group of
historians of the ecosystem services paradigm notes,
these uncertainties are not
the
growing
pains we might expect from an emerging research perspective. As is
clear when we look at the history of coastal marsh protection in the
Gulf Coast, nature's valuers have had at least 40 years experience to
figure things out. Instead, what lingering questions and simmering
debates reflect are genuine obstacles to a rightly controversial
practice.

In
attempting to answer these questions and close these debates, how
economists, regulators, and scientists go about valuing nature will
evolve. This of course is happening globally. One only has to follow
the Natural Capital Project around the world, from Colombia to
British Colombia, to get a sense of the importance of these places to
how the vision of nature as capital is being articulated and
materialized. But Louisiana and the rest of the Gulf Coast will
undoubetedly continue to be a sort of lab for experimenting on the
policy, science, and economics behind the valuation of nature - the
place where many of the important conversations ongoing about the
future of conservation in the face of climate change are worked out.
As a senior adviser to America's Wetland Foundation recently
put it,
“We can test it better than anyone.”

Thursday, July 17, 2014

A recent study - "Changes in the global value of ecosystem services" - has found that the value of the world's ecosystem services - the benefits nature provides to society, like the ability of wetlands to stem flooding - is somewhere in the neighborhood of $145 trillion. That is, without a doubt, a lot of money. It's in fact much more than the global economy as currently accounted for produces. In statistics like Gross Domestic Product (GDP) we count everything from the value of goods like cars to services like haircuts, and while we generally count the goods that nature provides, like timber and food, we've so far consigned the counting of nature's services to academic papers.

An important chunk of the $145 trillion is the $12-47 billion Louisiana wetlands generate in lessening the impact of storm surges, providing habitat for commercial fish species, and sequestering carbon dioxide. Worldwide, wetlands - and in particular, coastal marshes - are the single most monetarily valuable ecosystem. However, in Louisiana, they are being lost at a rapid rate because of oil and natural gas development, sea level rise, and levees along the Mississippi River that prevent sediment from settling out in floodplain marshes and building new land. In Gaining Ground, a study outlining the value of Louisiana's wetlands (featuring Bob Costanza, lead author of the "Changes" paper) researchers found that restoration of wetlands in the Mississippi River Delta could increase this ecosystem's asset value to $62 billion. The report's authors write:

"natural systems tend to appreciate in value rather than depreciate and fall apart as built capital does....natural capital is self-maintaining and lasts for a long time; it is fundamentally different from built capital, which deprecates quickly and requires capital and maintenance costs."

Similarly, as a write-up on the "Changes" paper put it - in pivoting from a point about the cost of flood protection levees raised by the Army Corps of Engineers after Hurricane Katrina - "And while it’s expensive to maintain man-made defenses, wetlands rebuild themselves."

What we get from both viewpoints is the sense that nature, as natural capital, does all this unpaid work for us. A wetland is like a factory worker: it gets up in the morning to go to work soaking up carbon dioxide, coming home at night to rest and reproduce itself for another day. Even better, it's a worker that only gets better with age. Natural capital, it seems, is any good businessman's holy grail: it's an investment that is self-valorizing.

But, really? Despite protest from area fishermen, any major restoration of the Mississippi River Delta wetlands is likely to feature diversions of sediment from the river through engineered breaches in levees, projects that are expected to cost up to several hundred million dollars each. The 2012 Master Plan, a document written by Louisiana's Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority to organize the state of coastal science and direct funds towards specific restoration sites, acknowledges that any large-scale restoration of the region's wetlands won't work without using the river. Sediment diversions are intended to harness the power of the river to do work building wetlands, but harnessing is a far cry from self-maintenance. Restored wetlands simply won't exist without the upkeep and ongoing operation of diversion megaprojects - built capital to be sure. It's equally naive to assume that wetlands will maintain themselves without legal efforts to prevent further degradation. Such efforts would be directed at stemming climate change and minimizing if not eliminating the ongoing impact of the oil and gas industry from spills and subsidence.

So is natural capital long-lasting, as the Gaining Ground authors suggest? With the right amount and kind of sediment input, wetlands do build themselves over time in relation to the sea level. Louisiana's Master Plan predicts diversion projects could provide decades of land-building. Even more forward-looking, scientists have determined that there is enough sand in the Mississippi River basin to build wetlands for at least 600 years. On the other hand, other projects are not so resilient. Some parishes in Louisiana are creating new marshes by dredging and piping up material from the bottom of the Gulf. But given current forecasts for irreversible sea level rise, these wetlands are expected to last only 20 years, perhaps functioning fully for only 5 years. Everyone knows it, but the short-term payoff from these massive engineering projects appears worth it.

In short, natural capital is not so separate from other other kinds of capital, like built capital. As the authors of Gaining Ground acknowledge, the restoration projects proposed in the Master Plan do not amount to "a cut-the-river-loose scenario." What they do amount to is a set of hybrid infrastructures that blur the lines between what we typically think of as natural and social. And even when the Mississippi does get cut loose, or rather, cuts itself loose, it may work against capital. A couple of years ago, a crevasse opened up in a levee south of New Orleans, delivering freshwater and sediment to flow into nearby marsh ecosystems. It is the Mississippi's first distributary to form in several decades. This is about as close to "natural" capital as one gets: the river is autonomously rebuilding coastal wetlands (though to deem it natural, you'd have to overlook the fact that it's breaching at the spot of an old spillway). But in the process, the crevasse has flooded several roads the oil/gas industry needs to access wells. The industry would rather have the breach fixed, while environmentalists say this is the very kind of thing the Master Plan calls for, except that it didn't cost a dime to happen. As the director of CPRA reflected, “If we can benefit the coast for ‘free,’ we would like to do that." That is the holy grail after all: a self-valorizing investment, or what Karl Marx called "free gifts of nature to capital." But... “The challenge is making sure that we are making decisions with our eyes open." That means making sure natural capital works for the oil/gas industry. The question that has to be asked here is not how much natural capital is the so-called Mardi Gras Pass creating, but under what conditions do ecosystems become capital? What is the line between an ecosystem service and disservice and who decides?

"Capital is a process not a thing," geographer David Harvey notes in his recent review of Thomas Piketty's miraculous hit of a book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. (To see how far the natural capital concept now reaches, just look at one of the last chapters of the book, where Piketty adopts the term. He essentially rehashes the Stern Review point that money invested now to fight climate change will pay off in the long run.) For Harvey, Piketty's asset-based conceptualization of capital - as inert and static pieces of stuff (cars) or discrete services (haircuts) plucked out of the world and made valuable - is inadequate. Capital is always in motion - it has to be, since for Harvey (and Marx) it is "a process of circulation in which money is used to make more money." Nothing can be capital unless it is being used productively.

Nature, then, simply is not "natural capital". In an early and influential paper on the value of ecosystem services, Gretchen Daily, alongside Nobel Prize-winning economists Kenneth Arrow among others, declared, "the world's ecosystems are capital assets. If properly managed, they yield a flow of vital services..." Similar sentiments are to be found throughout the green accounting realm. The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB), an EU-funded program promoting ecosystem services amongst decision-makers, wrote in their initial report on the first page in big bold lettering: "Maintaining stocks of natural capital allow the sustained provision of future flows of ecosystem services." But both Daily and TEEB get the formula backwards. Ecosystems are not capital with maintenance costs, much less self-maintaining capital, as the Gaining Ground report suggests. It is only after ecosystems are "properly managed" that they become something resembling capital, and then only if they work for capital. Marx already had hinted at this: "Natural elements entering as agents into production, and which cost nothing, no matter what role they play in production, do not enter as components of capital." It is only when they are labored upon that " a new additional element enters into capital."Realizing the potential $62 billion in asset value from Louisiana's wetlands does not mean harnessing some pre-existing, natural capital, but investing in infrastructure to produce nature as capital. It requires assemblages of what we usually consider separate social, or human, (engineered diversions, legal mandates) and natural (sediments, Spartina grasses) things to work. Our long-held distinctions between what counts as "natural" and what counts as "social" simply aren't helpful to understand the important work of ecosystems.

Tuesday, February 11, 2014

You won't get very far in the world of conservation today without hearing about how we're now in the Anthropocene: the epoch recognizing humanity as a geologic force with its fingerprint everywhere. For some, like The Nature Conservancy's Peter Kareiva, this represents a chance to rethink how to do conservation, focusing less on preserving an impossible wilderness apart from society and instead focusing on the valuation of ecosystem services. Others, like conservation biologist Michael Soulé, worry that we are forgetting to value nature for its own sake. There's been a rather unproductive back and forth focused on exactly this point since at least after Costanza et al. 1997, when Toman wrote that Costanza et al.'s calculation of the world's ecosystem services at about $33 trillion was "a serious underestimate of infinity." "And it goes on and on..." is how Paul Voosen reflected on yet another partisan weighing in. There seem to be few moderates, but I think both sides have something wrong and right.Below is anessay on the debate I originally wrote for Bill Cronon's American Environmental History seminar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the fall of 2013 [contact me for the full version with citations]. In many ways, today's debate reflects those between conservationists and preservationists in the US over the course of the 20th century. A version of the paper was also recently presented at the Center for Culture, History, and Environment graduate student symposium. Any thoughts are greatly appreciated!---
There’s a growing struggle within the ranks of conservationists, one that will have profound implications for how we deal with some of today’s most pressing environmental issues. At the heart of the matter is a choice about what constitutes conservation’s guiding question: is it about the role humans play in nature, or is it what role nature plays for humans? I’ve found myself stuck in the middle of the ensuing debate, wondering what to make of it and how to move it forward.
I first found myself in this conversation a couple of hot and sticky Junes ago at a conference called Ecosystem Services Markets: Making them Work. Ecosystem Services is a bit of jargon no one likes but everyone has gotten the hang of for naming what nature does for society: mitigate floods, provide clean water, and so on. The conference brought together nonprofit conservationists, federal agency staff, and VPs from corporations like Pepsi, Disney and Dow to figure out how to re-purpose corporate accounting ledgers to get conservation more money for saving mangroves and restoring prairies. I took in everything I could - I more or less transcribed every session I went to - all the while meditating on the irony of a group of nature-lovers sitting in air-conditioned luxury all day. Rest assured, there was a field trip, though you might call it a pilgrimage really. It was out to the chicken-coop-turned-weekend-get-a-way where Aldo Leopold sojourned every weekend from Madison to restore of bit of prairie habitat on a degraded piece of farm ground. It was here that Leopold first tested the principles of restoration ecology as an art and science, and it’s become a sort of sacred ground for conservationists.
Just up the road from the shack, we had stopped to observe a “constructed wetland” that a local conservation group had recently paid to put in. Their goal was to generate credits that would allow them to sell the ecological benefits of the wetland to interested buyers, in an ecosystem service market. The wetland was designed to take in excess runoff from a stream and filter out nutrients and chemicals before they made it too far down the way to the Gulf of Mexico. Glad to finally be outside, I was disappointed by it. It hadn’t filled up yet because of the unusually dry summer and so no wetland plants had yet colonize it. We stared at caked earth while we learned about the project. What made the disappointment sting was that this wetland was supposed to illustrate the benefits of everything we had been talking about all week: the ability of market incentives to generate investment in improving habitats.

Aldo Leopold at his shack north of Madison. Source: http://www.news.wisc.edu/story_images/4373/original/leo0537l__550px.jpg

As a huge poster in the conference hotel lobby proudly proclaimed, the goal had been to “price the priceless.” Yet, in what was one of the two core tenets of his land ethic, Leopold himself had remarked, “We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.” For conference-goers, treating land as a commodity had become, in fact, the very means of treating it with love and respect. The conservationists gathered in Madison held two ideas together at once: at Leopold’s shack, we celebrated his respect for the power of nature as something to which we belong, yet still apart from us. At the wetland just up the road, nature mattered only to the extent that it became a priced service. How do we understand these two, seemingly bipolar perspectives, and what do we do with them? Leopold’s call for us to belong to land as part of a community is appealing, while I remain uncertain about the prospect of commodifying nature. Environmental history is useful here, as it tells us how different perspectives on the ambit of conservation have evolved over time, and by paying close attention to untold and other sides of stories to see how conflicted conservation has been at times. People often see conservationists in stark terms, as “tree huggers” unwilling to cede ground to humans on any account. An environmental history approach can show conservationists have always been more complicated than that, and suggest a way out of the dilemma. In part that’s because environmental historians have also been active and influential participants in the conservation conversation.
The traditional reading of environmental politics in the US, as told by historians like Roderick Nash and Samuel Hays, starts at the battle of Hetch Hetchy. In the early 20th century, a national conflagration erupted over whether San Francisco should dam the valley in Yosemite National Park in order to provide the city with a long-term drinking water supply. Lines in the sand were drawn. On one side stood those who saw themselves as balancing the protection and enjoyment of nature with unavoidable future growth. Among such “conservationists” were Forest Service Chief Gifford Pinchot. On the other side stood preservationists like John Muir, who declared in no simple terms that the place was sacred – a temple - since it was free of the artifacts of civilization. The preservationists lost the day, but their organizing efforts established an important base for later campaigns.
Though the typical reading draws a straight line from Hetch Hetchy to the landmark Wilderness Act of 1964, others have rightfully complicated that story. The anti-dam base did grow into a concerted movement for wilderness protection, one led by the Wilderness Society that organized over decades to establish set asides for nature. But this was not, in fact, a repeat of Hetch Hetchy. As historian Paul Sutter has pointed out, the concern of the Wilderness Society was directed at increased tourism and recreation in new nature reserves rather than attempts to use such places for production. Nor was their view of wilderness founded in a sense that in these places one could find the sublime.

John Muir in the Sierras in 1902. Source: http://www.americaslibrary.gov/assets/jb/recon/jb_recon_muir_1_e.jpg

The Wilderness Society played a pivotal role in the passing of the Wilderness Act, which established legislative procedure for reserving permanently areas “untrammeled by man”. It’s worth taking a second to pause and consider the definition of that word, because it’s regularly used by critics of wilderness who see its advocates blindly chasing an illusory pristine nature removed from the human footprint. Indeed, it sounds an awful lot like “walked upon.” The Oxford dictionary, on the other hand, defines it as: “not deprived of freedom of action or expression; not restricted or hampered.” For advocates, wilderness represented nature able to grow to its own ends, rather than spaces where nature was not tread upon by mankind. The distinction is subtle but important, and we only have to look at the case of ecological restoration to see why. Leopold was a founding member of the Wilderness Society, and indeed, for him, wilderness was in large part a framework for learning from nature. On the prairie at his shack and at the University of Wisconsin’s arboretum, he was also one of the first to champion the cause of restoring ecosystems. Seeding the prairie and aiding it in its growth and functioning was undoubtedly an intervention in nature, yet it was one meant to give the big bluestem, compass plant, and associated fauna a freedom of expression. Restoration ecology, as a coherent unit of academic study and as a field of practice did not coalesce until the 1980s - well after Leopold’s time - and is still only gaining traction. Now and then, restorationists have split between a desire to get back to nature as it looked before settlement and restoration as means for “inventing” novel landscapes.
While Wisconsin’s William Jordan was busy assembling restoration ecology as we know it today, UC-Santa Cruz’s Michael Soulé set out to establish a related field, conservation biology. Blending scientific rigor and eco-advocacy, a coalition of academic researchers like Soulé and activists like EarthFirst!’s Dave Foreman lobbied for large wilderness areas to be established not as a way to preserve a sacred sublime, but to preserve biodiversity. Eschewing EarthFirst!’s strategy of highly visible political action, Foreman joined with Soulé to start the Wildlands Project, which they saw as a group that would more aggressively and directly campaign at a variety of levels of government for more and larger wilderness designations than the Wilderness Society.
The resurgence of preservationism came to a head in 1995. That year, the US Supreme Court ruled that the under the Endangered Species Act, to “harm” the habitat of threatened species like the northern spotted owl was to illegally “take” it. In a way, the ruling justified the Wildlands Project’s scientific and political argument that large spaces free of economically productive activity, like forestry, were necessary to protect biodiversity. But it also goaded foresters and others adopting the banner of “Wise Use” to claim that preservation was blind to or willfully ignorant of rural people’s concerns about jobs and economic growth. The ruling was a flashpoint for tensions between preservation and conservation.
The same year an interdisciplinary group of scholars, including environmental historians, stepped into the fray with their edited volume Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature. Meant to reach a wide audience, the volume provocatively directed its line of attack at wilderness proponents. Bill Cronon, for instance, wrote that “wilderness is no more ‘natural’ than nature is - it’s a reflection of our own longings, a profoundly human creation.” The argument drove at the heart of how advocates saw the wilderness concept as legitimate, while retaining a sense that humans have a responsibility to nature, one in the form of our own making. Richard White tackled the economic growth question head on by reflecting on the Wise Use bumper sticker slogna, “Are you an environmentalist or do you work for a living?” He showed how labor was just as much a relationship to the natural world as recreation, but his point was not to cede ground to Wise Use activists who claimed that their work gave them a privileged relation to nature. Instead, he noted that they had confused their “labor” with property rights - a specifically capitalist relation to nature. White made the case for a more inclusive conservation, without turning it over to the markets.
Uncommon Ground stirred a raft of critiques and counter-criticisms, but it wasn’t the only major intervention into such territory at the time. In 1997, several ecologists and economists launched another front against the kind of preservation advocated by the Wildlands Project. While the authors of Uncommon Ground deployed persuasive social theory as their tactic and many of them, like White, countered calls to see capitalism as a viable social relation to nature, monetary valuation was this group's policy Trojan Horse. The reframing of conservation’s object of concern to ecosystem services shared several arguments with Uncommon Ground: wilderness overlooks the nature that is close to home; it ignores the importance of achieving economic growth. Gretchen Daily, like Soulé a student of famous biologist Paul Ehrlich, edited 1997’s Nature’s Services. The effort was a first cut attempt to conceive of nature as composed of quantifiable and monetizable services that provide direct benefits to society, rather than existing for it’s own sake. The same year, Bob Costanza famously declared the dollar value of all of the world’s ecosystem services (ES) to be more or less $33 trillion.

The team of economists and ecologists who published Costanza et al. 1997, valuing the world's ecosystem services at roughly $33 trillion. Source: http://www.nceas.ucsb.edu/projects/2058

These admittedly rough estimates were meant to appeal to CEOs and Senators alike, and as they got better, they did. Resistance to the project has grown as well. The use of an ES framework to prove to policy-makers the value of conservation has set up a debate rather reminiscent of Hetch Hetchy. It’s Soulé who plays the part of Muir; the chief scientist for The Nature Conservancy, Peter Kareiva, plays Pinchot. This time around, the struggle is not focused on one site or one project (though there are plenty of small skirmishes), but addresses head on the larger question of whether conservation and capitalism are joined at the hips, just good friends, or perhaps anathema to each other. For Kareiva, conservation set asides simply haven’t lived up to their promise, they harm the global poor, and, adopting Cronon’s critique, wilderness lacks a solid conceptual grounding. Instead, he proclaims the Anthropocene - the recognition of humans as a geologic force in nature with its fingerprint everywhere - as conservation’s gospel. Alongside this, he offers the solution of harnessing the same capital that has historically degraded environments in order to direct investment to protecting and enhancing environments: “Instead of scolding capitalism,” he and his co-authors write, “conservationists should partner with corporations in a science-based effort to integrate the value of nature's benefits into their operations and cultures.” The ES framework has become what Kareiva calls the “new conservation,” and even “conservation science” as means to legitimize itself explicitly in contrast to conservation biology.
Soulé has responded directly to Kareiva and his colleagues. He notes that conservationists (reserving that moniker for himself and his allies) do understand that nature is everywhere, and have since Rachel Carson warned of the bodily dangers posed by DDT. Dubbing Kareiva et al. as “environmentalists,” he puts them in the camp of selling out (literally):

Most human beings and many environmentalists never doubt that biological diversity and every every thing every where is meant for human consumption, exploitation or recreation. Theirs is a world of resources and hoped for wealth. It is Old Testament view. In stark contrast, the goal of conservationism is other-centric. It stresses the intrinsic (for itself) value of non-human biological beings and aims to protect earth’s five million or so kinds of surviving creatures for their own sake.

Which bring us back to 2011 and the ecosystem services markets conference in Madison, where “pricing the priceless” was about determining the value of non-human biological beings for our own sake. In spite of Soulé’s impassioned argument, it’s clear that Kareiva currently has the edge, as The Nature Conservancy and other leading international conservation non profits work the world over with companies like Dow to value ecosystems and the services they provide.
I am not, however, telling the story of the final triumph of the Anthropocene after its flag-bearers have vanquished the forces of preservation. We have to see history as the art of people muddling through, and to document it, making things seem as messy as they truly are and as they truly were, rather than retreating to the conceit that the story has one final outcome, writing off the contradictions. As we’ve seen here, conservation is complicated; so too are conservationists. Today, even Kareiva’s project and the ecosystem services framework are not one in the same: he and his colleagues, for instance, critique the main international ES project to date, the Millenium Ecosystem Assessment. The ecologists working in ES still cherish many of the landscape ecology principles conservation biologists promoted. Historically, there’s been important rifts in the conservation community when it comes to knowing what nature is and what’s important about it: between wilderness as the sublime and nature as a source of use values to be conserved for future generations; wilderness as a temple, wilderness as enjoyment, and wilderness as a lab; between restoration and preservation; species biodiversity and recreation; human and eco-centric impulses. These valences have split not only figureheads like Pinchot and Muir, Kareiva and Soulé, but are often simultaneously embodied in a single person, perhaps an average conference attendee rather than a prominent advocate. Conservationists today muddle through conflicting mandates and mixed messages. It’s no surprise we see them at once praising Leopold for how he wanted to create a new, non-commodified relation with nature on its own terms, while at the same time seeking to “price the priceless” and make ecosystem services markets work.
We should embrace these contradictions rather than walk away from them. The general thrust of the Anthropocene project is noble: to take responsibility for natures we as a society have made. Its proponents rightfully build off of critiques of wilderness as exclusionary and illusory. But as a way of guiding our actions today, the Anthropocene is not without its own flaws. When plugged into arguments for capitalizing ecosystem services, it raises a number of red-flags, also about exclusion and who stands to benefit.What’s needed is a common ground: a perspective that envisions nature as “untrammeled,” but everywhere rather than reserved far away, and not subject to the whims of market forces to secure its value. The standoff between conservation biology and conservation science doesn’t have to be just a repeat of conservation vs. preservation, of nature for human values vs. nature for nature’s sake. I have a hunch of where to find such space. It would be a way of talking about and doing conservation that holds in tension the project of recognizing the world is more-than-us with the realization that today’s human interventions in nature are unparalleled to anything in history. What’s needed is a posthuman Anthropocene.

Friday, January 17, 2014

You might remember that last summer, the levee board responsible for protecting much of metro New Orleans filed a landmark lawsuit against some 90 oil and gas companies. The Southeast Louisiana Flood Production Authority - East (SLFPAE), formed after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, claimed that the canals these companies carved across coastal wetlands to set up drilling operations were significant drivers of wetland loss in the area historically, losses which could have mitigated storm surges. Pointing to industry, government, and academic reports alike they claim that the companies have not fulfilled their responsibility to fill in the canals and restore exploration and drilling sites.

Wednesday, in a must-view PowerPoint presentation to the state's Coastal Planning and Restoration Authority (CPRA), SLFPAE made a pretty compelling defense of their case. What they did was zoom in on one particular case - the Delacroix area in St. Bernard parish - where canals have led to saltwater intrusion, erosion, and ultimately the conversion of marsh and swamp land into open water. I've gathered the slide by slide time series they presented into a handy GIF to illustrate their argument:

Wetland loss between 1956 and 2008 in the Delacroix, LA area. Canals that were dredged in order to move oil equipment are drawn in red arrows. Source: SLFPAE presentation.

You can see the same result when we focus in on just the past fifteen years With Google Earth imagery, I created another GIF that spans every other year or so from 1998 to the present.

Wetland loss between 1998 and the present in Delacroix. Source: Google Earth.

CPRA's chairman, Garrett Graves, however, is not so convinced by SLFPAE's argument. He thinks that going after the hydrocarbon industry is misguided. Instead, CPRA intends to sue the Army Corps of Engineers to get that agency to own up to the role that the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet (MRGO) shipping channel played in altering hydrological regimes in the wetland complex east of New Orleans and in shuttling Katrina's storm surge straight into the city. The meeting yesterday was just the most recent and most visible skirmish in a war of words between CPRA and SLFPAE over whether the SLFPAE lawsuit is legitimate and whether CPRA's approach would be more effective.

At first glance, it seems like SLFPAE and CPRA's disagreement is mainly over what they see as the causes of wetland loss in the area. SLFPAE points at oil/gas companies and their extensive network of canals; CPRA the corps and MRGO. But this is not just a debate about who's to blame. As SLFPAE's lawyers pointed out in their presentation, Graves himself has repeatedly acknowledged the part played by the hydrocarbon industry's canals. Everyone agrees, to a significant extent, that the problem has multiple drivers, whether they're as prominent as MRGO or as ubiquitous as oil/gas canals. The two institutions primarily disagree about what's the most politically and economically beneficial line of attack to solve the problem. SLFPAE says getting oil money can more than pay the bills on the state's ambitious $50 billion dollar master plan for coastal restoration; Graves seems to think that would result in less money going to communities for restoration. Obviously, the choice of who to blame has meaningful consequences for what gets fixed, but it'd be a mistake to think that one side doesn't get the ecological reasoning of the other.

Speaking of who to blame, take another look at the second GIF. If you didn't already notice it, much of the conversion of the Delacroix wetlands into open water happens between 2004 and 2005 (the pic that year was taken in October). Of course, as the first GIF demonstarted, wetlands loss had been occurring there for decades by then. But Katrina appears to have been the coup de grace. Research has shown how hurricanes and other weather events lead to wetland loss: the wetlands in Louisiana east of the Mississippi River lost up to 25% of their land area after Katrina. The presence of canals undoubtedly exacerbated Katrina's effect here, but the storm itself nevertheless has had a singular and lasting effect on the landscape.

The easy thing to do is wonder whether all the money the state plans to spend to rebuild barrier islands and wetlands will just be washed away by the very storms they are meant to mitigate. The tougher and more important question to ask is whether decision-makers and conservationists realize this and are prepared to engage in a continual investment to redesign a landscape shaped by climate change.

Tuesday, December 31, 2013

I've assembled a non-exhaustive, non-representative sample of stories in the ecosystem services world (broadly defined) from this year that promise to be important in 2014. Here they are - what are yours?

2013 was a year chock full of hotspots of ecosystem services projects and controversy - like the debates in the UK over the country's new habitat mitigation market - but among them, Louisiana stands out. Dubbed "the Himalayas of ecosystem services," there's been more than enough to report on there. There's the very beginnings of RESTORE Act implementation, for starters. The Act will take all the cash BP gets fined in its civil trial and put it towards comprehensive wetland restoration and sediment diversion projects across the Gulf. It's a windfall for the region, and state agencies and conservationists there want to spend the money wisely, knowing what they get for their investment. They've written a raft of plans on how to proceed, and ES feature prominently as the objects of concern and the measures ($ and otherwise) of success. We'll see more projects coming online in 2014 and begin to see their effectiveness.

Speaking of BP's ongoing civil trial, there've been lawsuits left and right in Louisiana this year that revolve around what's the best way to do coastal restoration and who's to blame for the mess of wetland loss. As arguments came to their final stage in BP's ongoing civil trial, the southeastern Louisiana levee board that was created after Katrina to deal with systemic wetland loss in the area drew on some arcane French-era law on levees to launch a multi-billion dollar lawsuit against oil/gas companies for the part their canals have played in destroying wetlands. That drew the outrage of the state's Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority, who says, no, the Army Corps of Engineers and their levees on the Mississippi are to blame. Gov. Jindal had John Barry - the levee board member who advocated for the lawsuit - sacked while CPRA went ahead with its own lawsuit against the corps. The different lawsuits are not just indicative of differing opinions of who's to blame - the corps or the resource extraction industry - but of what's the best way to do restoration: fill in old oil/gas canals, or breach levees to divert sediment to form new land?

If billion dollar plans and lawsuits weren't enough, New Orleans was named one of the Rockefeller Foundation's 100 resilient cities. NOLA will get a "Chief Resilience Officer" funded by Rockefeller and the city will also be the test site for some new software made by the same company that makes data mining tools for the CIA that will help the new CRO figure out what investments in resilience will be most likely to payoff.

2013 saw yet more institutions organizing business and government around seeing environmental degradation as a matter of nature's benefits not having an economic value. That's not to say these new fora and panels actually did anything about the very issues on which they pontificated. I'm thinking here about November's first World Forum on Natural Capital, which was essentially more a feel-good pep talk for corporate leaders and less a hashing out of actionable tasks. It didn't go uncontested and in 2014 we should expect to see the same sort of opposition that we've see for carbon as business leaders aim to price any and all other ES. In December, the new Intergovernmental Panel on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services convened in Turkey to finalize their first work plan. It's been years in the making and we'll see in 2014 how it starts to get implemented.

The story that most fell under the radar this year was the White House's executive order on climate change adaptation and resilience. This year, about 30 federal agencies developed their first-ever set of plans for how they intend to respond to climate change in their operations and outreach. The EO goes a step further and calls on all agencies to revamp their programs to make it easier to fund projects that are meant to support resilience, for agencies like Interior to manage their lands for resilience, for agencies to develop data and tools for recognizing resilience, and for agencies to plan for climate change risk. All these have the potential to be driving significant work in the coming year and beyond.

The story that wasn't was the US Supreme Court's ruling that appears to constrain regulators' flexibility in determining appropriate compensation for wetland and stream impacts under the Clean Water Act. It's not yet clear whether it'll actually turn out to be problematic. Meanwhile, EPA and ACOE are finally getting around to clarifying what wetlands and streams are within their ambit, a move that environmentalists have long fought for in the legislative sphere. As the draft guidance currently stands, it could bring in millions of dollars more in compensation work yearly because it expands what counts as a water of the US.

The single best piece out there this year on ES was Paul Voosen's history of ES as told through Gretchen Daily, Peter Kareiva, and Michael Soule. He does a brillant job showing how even if it looks like it from 30,000 feet not every conservationist is on board with the project of valuing nature, and he ties this in with an on the ground look at ES "modelling sausage." If you haven't read it yet, go do it now. The runner-up is SciAm's recent piece characterizing the paradigms and debates in wetland restoration today, with a major focus on differing opinions on how to do work in the Gulf.

Tuesday, December 17, 2013

"Mining companies like to say, 'The gold is where the gold is, that's where we need to go,'" said Chet Van Dellen, GIS coordinator for Nevada's Department of Wildlife. "We like to say the animals are where the animals are." New high-tech maps detail wildlife habitat in West, Scott Sonner, 12/13/13

Late last week a coalition of western governors released a new tool meant to help gold miners, transportation designers, energy companies - just about anybody with a natural resource impact - to plan development projects. CHAT, the Crucial Habitat Assessment Tool, going to be one big map for the West, and although it's not entirely filled out yet, the idea is to show those gold miners, hey, here's where our important habitats are. It pays to be clear: the maps are not, as the AP's headline suggests, simply mapping wildlife habitat in greater detail. The tool's resolution is somewhat impressive - down to the square mile - but what it's really doing is visualizing the spaces where project managers can expect to run into problems getting their permits. Some habitats will not be as crucial or as much of a priority as others. The difference may be subtle, but on it turns the role mapping plays in setting the public agenda in environmental governance today.

Here's how CHAT works. Each state has gathered a bunch of data and assigned weights to different kinds of habitats, on a scale from 1-6 (most to least important). The weights are based on information like the condition of habitat as well as economic significance. Each state has its own process, and very often, it's got its very own personal CHAT tool. You should expect no less from the West, and this brand of formal coordination, was likely what got every single western state on board. What CHAT isn't is a project to get all states on board to a similar standard for evaluating habitat significance. It's just meant to project (in the mapping sense) the standards each one already has. Take a look at some of the screenshots of the map if you haven't already, because you can see differences in regulatory regimes on the map.

Where you'd expect some important habitats to cross-cut state boundaries, like in Yellowstone, we see that they cut off at Montana, either because the state hasn't gotten around to doing it's categorization yet or because that habitat simply isn't as important to Montana as it is to Wyoming. CHAT is meant to show all western states so that if you're a pipeliner you can see what sort of regulatory resistance you're going to run into across your entire project. Or if you're a gold miner, you can easily see whether it'll be easier to do a project in Utah or Arizona.

It may have been five years in the making, but it's roots go back way further. It wouldn't be much of a stretch to start at the Articles of Confederation to get a sense of what kind of coordination this represents: federalism. Not only does each state gets to develop and share its own particular habitat standards, the map is a way for states to show federal authorities that, hey, we've got everything under control here, much as they are doing with candidate species rulings. More concretely, though, we only have to go back to the mid 90s to understand why we have CHAT now. Federal listing of endangered species like the northern spotted owl generated what boil down to two calls, two sides of the same coin really: state-led environmental policy, and economics-sensitive environmental policy. It'd be no understatement to say that most environmental politics in the West for the past 20 years has been an outgrowth, good or bad, to the issues raised at that time. Utah's and Oregon's governors, on separate sides of the aisle, have developed a set of principles they dubbed, "Enlibra" that they've promoted in the WGA. Enlibra is a new regulatory regime whose ambit is reconciling economic growth and environmental protection, and we've gotten ecosystem services markets and community forestry alike, to name a few examples, out of it. As a prioritization tool rather than a data display tool, CHAT is straight out of the Enlibra playbook.

But here's what it all comes back to: I can't help but feeling that CHAT is like showing your opponent your hand in a game of cards. Of course, it's not like the Nevada Department of Wildlife or some other agency couldn't say, "psych!" and go back on their promise of little regulatory resistance: the map isn't immutable. That also means there's no reason they couldn't go back on their promise of heavy regulatory resistance. The map is a curious legal entity. There's no mandate for all western states to make it: it doesn't have to exist or be used. But it sort of justifies its own existence. All I mean is that by putting the map - described as a "pro-development tool" by the Nevada Department of Wildlife - out there into the world, it's going to be hard to take it back. Developers, regulators, and even the Center for Biological Diversity like it, and that gives it a ton of legitimacy that goes beyond its ambiguous legal status.

All the cards are on the table now in the West. It's not clear yet whether that's a good thing. It'll probably make regulators' lives easier, for one. There's also certainly a power in being the one to set the terms of engagement. Either way, maps like CHAT are going to play an important role in the making of the relationship between states, nature, and capital in the near term. Just take a look at the interactive maps the Coastal Resilience Network has set up that allows users to choose how important different economic and ecological variables are to determining great places to do restoration. It's not a regulatory map (yet), but you can imagine some of the opportunities that it would afford regulators. It'd make it easier for them to say, for instance, hey, we made the map based on how users (citizens?), not us, weighted restoration priorities. It's not our fault...Stay tuned for more.

A true point of beginning

The term "True Point of Beginning" is used in surveying to describe the spot to which all other site delineations ultimately refer. Here I wander around the vast field of ecosystem service politics in the US, hoping to get a bearing back to how and why environmental regulators, conservation NGOs, entrepreneurs, scientists, and others come to treat nature as a service and to what end. I'm a geographer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.